Concept
Library (computing)
Related concepts (37)
Man page
A man page (short for manual page) is a form of software documentation usually found on a Unix or Unix-like operating system. Topics covered include computer programs (including library and system calls), formal standards and conventions, and even abstract concepts. A user may invoke a man page by issuing the man command. By default, man typically uses a terminal pager program such as more or less to display its output.
Software framework
In computer programming, a software framework is an abstraction in which software, providing generic functionality, can be selectively changed by additional user-written code, thus providing application-specific software. It provides a standard way to build and deploy applications and is a universal, reusable software environment that provides particular functionality as part of a larger software platform to facilitate the development of software applications, products and solutions.
Late binding
In computing, late binding or dynamic linkage—though not an identical process to dynamically linking imported code libraries—is a computer programming mechanism in which the method being called upon an object, or the function being called with arguments, is looked up by name at runtime. In other words, a name is associated with a particular operation or object at runtime, rather than during compilation. The name dynamic binding is sometimes used, but is more commonly used to refer to dynamic scope.
Value (computer science)
In computer science and software programming, a value is the representation of some entity that can be manipulated by a program. The members of a type are the values of that type. The "value of a variable" is given by the corresponding mapping in the environment. In languages with assignable variables, it becomes necessary to distinguish between the r-value (or contents) and the l-value (or location) of a variable. In declarative (high-level) languages, values have to be referentially transparent.
Dynamic loading
Dynamic loading is a mechanism by which a computer program can, at run time, load a library (or other ) into memory, retrieve the addresses of functions and variables contained in the library, execute those functions or access those variables, and unload the library from memory. It is one of the 3 mechanisms by which a computer program can use some other software; the other two are static linking and dynamic linking.
Conditional compilation
In computer programming, conditional compilation is a compilation technique which results in an executable program that is able to be altered by changing specified parameters. This technique is commonly used when these alterations to the program are needed to run it on different platforms, or with different versions of required libraries or hardware. Many programming languages support conditional compilation. Typically compiler directives define or "undefine" certain variables; other directives test these variables and modify compilation accordingly.
Information hiding
In computer science, information hiding is the principle of segregation of the design decisions in a computer program that are most likely to change, thus protecting other parts of the program from extensive modification if the design decision is changed. The protection involves providing a stable interface which protects the remainder of the program from the implementation (whose details are likely to change).